ties, of improving the morals of mankind by a direct appeal to their understandings; to show the diftinction between attention and thought, and the neceffity of the former as a habit or difcipline without which the very word, thinking, must remain a thoughtless substitute for dreaming with our eyes open; and lastly, the tendency of a certain fashionable style with all its accommodations to paralyze the very faculties of manly intellect by a series of petty stimulants. After this preparation, I proceed at once to lay the foundations common to the whole work by an inquiry into the duty of communicating truth, and the conditions under which it may be communicated with fafety, from effay V. to XVI. inclufively. Each effay will, I believe, be found complete in itself, yet an organic part of the whole confidered as one difquifition. First, the inexpediency of pious frauds is proved from hiftory, the shameless affertion of the indifference of truth and falfehood expofed to its deferved infamy, and an answer given to the objection derived from the impoffibility of conveying an adequate notion of the truths, we may attempt to communicate. The conditions are then detailed, under which, right though inadequate notions may be taught without danger, and proofs given, both from facts and from reason, that he, who fulfils the conditions required by confcience, takes the surest way of answering the purposes of prudence. This is, indeed, the main characteristic of the moral system taught by The Friend throughout, that

LANDING-PLACE. the diftinct forefight of confequences belongs exclufively to the infinite Wisdom which is one with that Almighty Will, on which all confequences depend; but that for man-to obey the fimple unconditional commandment of efchewing every act that implies a self-contradiction, or, in other words, to produce and maintain the greatest possible harmony in the component impulses and faculties of his nature, involves the effects of prudence. It is, as it were, prudence in fhort-hand or cypher. A pure conscience, that inward something, that 9ɛòs oinεios, which being abfolutely unique no man can describe, because every man is bound to know, and even in the eye of the law is held to be a perfon no longer than he may be supposed to know it -the confcience, I fay, bears the fame relation to God, as an accurate time-piece bears to the fun. The time-piece merely indicates the relative path of the fun, yet we can regulate our plans and proceedings by it with the fame confidence as if it was itself the efficient cause of light, heat, and the revolving seasons: on the self-evident axiom, that in whatever sense two things-for inftance, A. and C. D. E., —are both equal to a third thing, B., they are in the fame fenfe equal to each other. Cunning is circuitous folly. In plain English, to act the knave is but a round about way of playing the fool; and the man, who will not permit himself to call an action by its proper name without a previous calculation of all its probable consequences, may be indeed only a coxcomb, who is looking at

his fingers through an opera glass; but he runs no small risk of becoming a knave. The chances are against him. Though he should begin by calculating the confequences with regard to others, yet by the mere habit of never contemplating an action in its own proportions and immediate relations to his moral being, it is scarcely poffible but that he muft end in selfishness: for the 'you,' and the 'they' will stand on different occafions for a thoufand different perfons, while the 'I' is one only, and recurs in every calculation. Or grant that the principle of expediency should prompt to the fame outward deeds as are commanded by the law of reafon; yet the doer himself is debafed. But if it be replied, that the re-action on the agent's own mind is to form a part of the calculation, then it is a rule that destroys itself in the very propounding, as will be more fully demonstrated in the second or ethical divifion of The Friend, when I shall have detected and exposed the equivoque between an action and a series of motions, by which the determinations of the will are to be realized in the world of the fenfes. What modification of the latter corresponds to the former, and is entitled to be called by the fame name, will often depend on time, place, perfons and circumstances, the confideration of which requires an exertion of the judgment; but the action itself remains the fame, and like all other ideas pre-exists in the reafon, or, in the more expreffive and perhaps more precise and philofophical language of St. Paul, in

the fpirit, unalterable because unconditional, or with no other than that most awful condition, as fure as God liveth, it is fo!

These remarks are inferted in this place, because the principle admits of eafieft illuftration in the inftance of veracity and the actions connected with the fame, and may then be intelligibly applied to other departments of morality, all of which Woollfton indeed confiders as only fo many different forms of truth and falfehood. So far I treated of oral communication of the truth. The applicability of the fame principle is then tried and affirmed in publications by the press, first as between the individual and his own confcience, and then between the publisher and the state: and under this head I have confidered at large the queftions of a free prefs and the law of libel, the anomalies and peculiar difficulties of the latter, and the only poffible folution compatible with the continuance of the former: a folution rifing out of and juftified by the neceffarily anomalous and unique nature of the law itself. I confefs that I look back on this difcuffion concerning the press and its limits with a fatisfaction unufual to me in the review of my own labours: and if the date of their first publication (September, 1809) be remembered, it will not perhaps be denied on an impartial comparison, that I have treated this most important subject, so especially interesting in the present time, more fully and more fyftematically than it had up to that time been. Interim tum

recti confcientia, tum illo me confolor, quod optimis quibufque certe non improbamur, fortaffis omnibus placituri, fimul atque livor ab obitu conquieverit.

Lastly, the subject is concluded even as it commenced, and as beseemed a difquifition placed as the steps and veftibule of the whole work, with an enforcement of the abfolute neceffity of principles grounded in reason as the bafis or rather as the living root of all genuine expedience. Where these are despised or at best regarded as aliens from the actual bufinefs of life, and configned to the ideal world of speculative philosophy and Utopian politics, instead of state wisdom we shall have ftate-craft, and for the talent of the governor the cleverness of an embarraffed fpendthrift-which confifts in tricks to fhift off difficulties and dangers when they are close upon us, and to keep them at arm's length, not in solid and grounded courses to preclude or fubdue them. We must) content ourselves with expedient-makers - with fire-engines against fires, life-boats against inundations; but no houses built fire-proof, no dams that rise above the water-mark. The reader will have obferved that already has the term, reason, been frequently contradiftinguished from the understanding and the judgment. If I could fucceed in fully explaining the sense in which the word reafon is employed by me, and in fatisfying the reader's mind concerning the grounds and importance of the distinction, I should feel little or no apprehenfion concerning the intelligibility of these